Free Second Violin by John Lawton Page A

contribution to the game.
    It was not a leaf, it was a piece of the Torah. The holy word of the God of his ancestors, looted from the ark, shredded like yesterday’s newsprint.
    The text was still legible, three words of Hebrew clear and distinct upon the scorched paper – a quotation Hummel recognised from Genesis, ‘brimstone and fire’, and he knew how
it ended . . . ‘brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven’ . . . and the destruction of Sodom followed. He thought it singularly inappropriate. This was Vienna not Sodom. This was
the work of man not God. He looked up, as though searching for someone with whom to share the thought. He was alone. All around had fled, and down the street came the same bunch of Brownshirts he
had missed going the other way. They had lost their quarry and were now lumbering up to him. Hummel’s first reaction to the cry of ‘Jew-boy!’ was a silent ‘Who me?’
And his second was to run.
    Hummel ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping. Down Leopoldstrasse, around the next corner.
    ‘Get-’im-catch-’im-rip-’is-bollocks-off!’
    The cries pursued him round the corner, through an alley and into the next main street. A man standing in a doorway took off after him, and for a second Hummel thought he was caught, but a
backward glance told him it was just another Jew in the same plight. Hummel turned left into another alley. The man ran straight on and the Brownshirts followed him instead of Hummel. Hummel
emerged at the other end of the alley – suddenly it was almost quiet. No noises on the street, but off the street, high up in the apartments, he could hear the shouts and the crashes as the
boot of the new civilisation met the flesh and culture of the old. He stepped back into a shop doorway as windows on a third floor burst outwards showering the street in broken glass. A woman
screamed, and just as suddenly stopped. Then Hummel heard grunts of exhortation and something very large appeared on the window ledge. A tallboy? A wardrobe? Hummel heard a jangling, a discordant
music, as though a cat had just run across the keyboard of a piano. Then he realised. It was a piano. A full-sized concert grand was pushed out and dropped into the street below. It seemed to
Hummel to land like some outsized creature in one of those American Disney cartoons he had occasionally seen at the cinema. The legs splayed like an elephant on ice, the belly of the beast hit the
cobbles, the lid shot up and the keyboard exploded in a roman candle of ebony and ivory.
    Brownshirts appeared at the window, jostling each other for a view and laughing. They soon tired of the joke, their heads pulled back and the screams from within began again. Hummel emerged from
the shadows. The piano seemed to be humming rather like an aeolian harp, the wind across its strings. Hummel crept closer. The humming seemed less like an instrument and more human. He stood on the
remains of the lid and peeked in. There, on the metal frame of the piano, lay a short man of sixty or so – crucified . . . strapped down, tied into place with piano wire. He was naked, he was
drenched in blood, his chest was punctured where a rib protruded through the flesh, and he was indeed humming. One note might be groaning. Three was humming. It was not a tune Hummel knew.
    His eyes opened, he looked at Hummel and spoke.
    ‘Oh my God . . .’ he said, and died.
    A blow to the kidneys doubled Hummel up, he felt his knees give way, beery breath upon his face, and a voice in his ear.
    ‘Right, Jew-boy . . . you’ll get yours next.’
    Hummel sank to the cobblestones. They kicked him in both legs until the pain of the blows was worse than the pain in his back and then he struggled to his feet. There were six of them, the same
six he’d shaken off only minutes before. Two hoisted him upright, a third punched him in the face, and he found himself frog-marched, half-conscious and tasting blood, off down the